On November 23, 2020, LEGO published an article titled "How to spot a fake LEGO® webstore".
For those of you who do not know the whole story, the situation is that many fans have unfortunately fell into scams visiting websites that copy the lego.com layout, "offer" products at such low prices that no real store could offer without going bankrupt for generating no revenue, not only that, they don't deliver the product, and the website eventually goes offline and appears some time later under a new url.
Unfortunately this situation also affects people with legitimate stores, and those of us who recommend LEGO products, so in here we will tell you some sites you could usually trust.
One of the most common pattern found in online resources that offers you to buy lego, is that the links in those online resources will usually end up taking you to either: https://lego.com or https://amazon.com
As you can see in the lego.com link below, the visible part of it says https://lego.com, but the actual hyperlink says it is taking you to this url: https://click.linksynergy.com/deeplink?id=qTUaH/rGPxQ&mid=13923&murl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lego.com%2Fen-us%2Faboutus%2Fnews%2F2020%2Fnovember%2Fhow-to-spot-a-fake-lego-webstore
In this case you know you can trust the hyperlink, because when you click it, you will eventually be redirected to https://www.lego.com, in this specific case this is just a link used for Affiliate Marketing that you will find in many legitimate online resources that recommend lego products.
This way of hiding/masking the actual url, is a way many scammers perform in order to trick you into believing you are visiting a legitimate website.
You will also find many links which are shortened, e.g. https://bit.ly/3lcQCqm
Shortening links is a widely used technique which is useful to generate simple links that can be easily tracked, and even memorized, this however is another way scammers exploit in order to trick people to fall into their scams, as we mentioned before, legitimate websites will usually end up taking you to either lego.com or amazon.com
In the case of shortened links you can use online resources called URL Expanders which would take the shortened link, and return you the real hyperlink.
If you know and trust the source which is giving you shortened links, you way want to use them directly without expanding because many times these links are used to perform analytics to eventually be able to give you a better service.
Here are some urls you can usually trust
- Bricksie
- About page has most if not all of his associated links you can trust. Also his videos descriptions have links you can trust.
- Beyond The Brick
- About page has most if not all of their associated links you can trust. Also their videos descriptions have links you can trust.
- Boone Build
- About page has some of his links you can trust. Also his videos descriptions have links you can trust.
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